In D.C.'s Web Voting Test, the Hackers Were the Good Guys
Washington Post (10/30/10) Jeremy Epstein; David Jefferson; Barbara Simons
Washington, D.C., held an Internet voting experiment in September during which a team of University of Michigan hackers successfully penetrated election computers and rigged the electoral outcome, demonstrating the extreme national security hazards of online voting, write SRI International computer scientist Jeremy Epstein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher David Jefferson, and former ACM president Barbara Simons. They say the test verifies that Internet voting systems can be assaulted from anywhere by any malicious individual or entity, and effective defense is a virtual impossibility. Worse still, a cyberattack against an election may be completely invisible to election officials. The computer security community agrees that no secure Internet voting framework exists for public elections, and that simply correcting the problems highlighted by the recent experiment will not ensure the system's security. Epstein, Jefferson, and Simons contend that the hacker team "has done our nation an enormous service" by calling attention to the dangers of Internet voting, but they lament that more than 30 U.S. states are permitting the use of online voting systems in the midterm elections, despite the lessons learned from the D.C. experiment.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Blog: In D.C.'s Web Voting Test, the Hackers Were the Good Guys
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Blog: Computer Scientists Make Progress on Math Puzzle
Computer Scientists Make Progress on Math Puzzle
UT Dallas News (10/28/10) David Moore
University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) professors Linda Morales and Hal Sudborough have made progress on the Topswops mathematical puzzle. Stanford University computer scientist Donald Knuth previously proved an exponential upper bound on the number of Topswops steps, but Morales and Sudborough proved a lower bound that is better than that proposed in Knuth's conjecture. "What I find fascinating about a problem such as bounding the Topswops function is connected to its simplicity, to its fundamental nature, and to the complexity and difficulty of finding an answer," Sudborough says. "Our research uncovered permutations whose iterate sequences have a fascinating structure, which upon analysis have revealed hitherto unknown lower bounds for the problem," Morales says. Knuth called their proof technique both "elegant" and "amazing." "There is much more to learn from the problem," Morales says. "We have tantalizing hints of more revelations just waiting to be uncovered."
Monday, October 25, 2010
Blog: 7 Programming Languages on the Rise
7 Programming Languages on the Rise
InfoWorld (10/25/10) Peter Wayner
Seven increasingly popular niche programming languages offer features that cannot be found in the dominant languages. For example, Python has gained popularity in scientific labs. "Scientists often need to improvise when trying to interpret results, so they are drawn to dynamic languages which allow them to work very quickly and see results almost immediately," says Python's creator Guido von Rossum. Many Wall Street firms also rely on Python because they like to hire university scientists to work on complex financial analysis problems. Meanwhile, Ruby is becoming popular for prototyping. Ruby sites are devoted to cataloging data that can be stored in tables. MatLab was originally designed for mathematicians to solve systems of linear equations, but it also has found a following in the enterprise because of the large volumes of data that organizations need to analyze. Although JavaScript is not a new programming language, new applications for JavaScript are constantly in development. For example, CouchDB uses JavaScript's Map and Reduce functions to help bring harmony to both client and server-side programming. Other popular niche languages include R, which also is known as S and S-Plus, Erlang, Cobol, and CUDA.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Blog: As E-Voting Comes of Age, Security Fears Mount
As E-Voting Comes of Age, Security Fears Mount
Agence France-Presse (10/24/10) Rob Lever
New technologies that allow voters to cast ballots using the Internet or other electronic means are gaining popularity in the United States and elsewhere, despite growing security concerns. Thirty-three U.S. states are allowing some email, fax, or online ballots in 2010, according to the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF). These systems have the potential to increase voter participation but their security remains in question. For example, University of Michigan computer scientists recently hacked into a Washington D.C. pilot Internet voting system and changed the password directing the system to play the university fight song. "Within the first three hours or so of looking at the code we found the first open door and within 36 hours we had taken control of the system," according to Michigan professor Alex Halderman. He says that during the attack they discovered that hackers from Iran and China also were trying to hack into the system. "After this, there can be no doubt that the burden of proof in the argument over the security of Internet voting systems has definitely shifted to those who claim that the systems can be made secure," says VVF chairman David Jefferson.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Blog: D.C. Hacking Raises Questions About Future of Online Voting
D.C. Hacking Raises Questions About Future of Online Voting
Stateline.org (10/22/10) Sean Greene
Washington, D.C.'s failure to prevent a team of University of Michigan computer scientists from taking control of its online voting Web site has called into the question the future of electronic voting. Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman noted that his team had taken complete control over the elections board's server. Although some experts say the incident proves that the Internet, in its current state, cannot support secure online voting, others still see potential in the technology. For example, Arizona and eight counties in West Virginia are planning to go ahead with online voting experiments on November 2. "All an attacker has to find is one hole in a system to mount a serious attack," warns University of California, Berkeley researcher Joe Hall. Washington D.C. used a system based on open source software, believing that it provides the transparency necessary for elections. The West Virginia counties are using proprietary software that officials say should be more resistant to hackers. Rokey Suleman, executive director of the D.C. board of elections, says the hacking incident is an opportunity to improve the technology. "We are not disappointed that this occurred," Suleman says. "It is an opportunity for the computer science community to work with us."
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Blog: New Search Method Tracks Down Influential Ideas
New Search Method Tracks Down Influential Ideas
Princeton University (10/20/10) Chris Emery
Princeton University computer scientists have developed a method that uses computer algorithms to trace the origins and spread of ideas, which they say could make it easier to measure the influence of scholarly papers, news stories, and other information sources. The algorithms analyze how language changes over time within a group of documents and determines which documents had the most influence. "The point is being able to manage the explosion of information made possible by computers and the Internet," says Princeton professor David Blei. He says the search method could eventually enable historians, political scientists, and other scholars to study how ideas originate and spread. The Princeton method enables computers to analyze the actual text of documents, instead of focusing on citations, to see how the language changes over time. "We are also exploring the idea that you can find patterns in how language changes over time," Blei says.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Blog: Analyzing Almost 10 Million Tweets, Research Finds Public Mood Can Predict Dow Days in Advance
Analyzing Almost 10 Million Tweets, Research Finds Public Mood Can Predict Dow Days in Advance
IU News Room (10/18/10) Steve Chaplin
Indiana University researchers found that by analyzing millions of tweets they can predict the movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) up to a week in advance with near 90 percent accuracy. Indiana professor Johan Bollen and Ph.D. candidate Huina Mao used two mood-tracking tools to analyze the text content of more than 9.8 million Twitter feeds and compared the public mood to the DJIA's closing value. One tool, called OpinionFinder, analyzed the tweets to give a positive or negative daily time series of public mood. The other tool, Google-Profile of Mood States, measures the mood of tweets in six dimensions--calm, alert, sure, vital, kind, and happy. The two tools gave the researchers seven public mood time series that could be matched against a similar daily time series for the DJIA closing. "What we found was an accuracy of 87.6 percent in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average," Bollen says. The researchers demonstrated that public mood can significantly improve the accuracy of the basic models currently used to predict Dow Jones closing values by implementing a prediction model called a Self-Organizing Fuzzy Neural Network.